Some of you may have seen Vulajin's pastebin on DS emulation vs. console. It details some testing done between various DS models and DeSmuME for Pokémon games, and the results suggest that playing on DS is faster than playing on 3DS due to the 3DS being slower for loading transitions. However, the testing between DS and 3DS was only done on Pokémon Black as far as I can see.

I performed a similar test to Vulajin's (go up and down the stairs to and from your bedroom 10 times) in Pokémon Diamond. There was no difference between the time taken on DS and on 3DS. I also repeated the tests described in the pastebin for Pokémon Black and Black 2, and confirmed that the DS was faster than the 3DS there. I believe that the only cases where the 3DS runs a game slower than the DS is if the game in question is a DSi-enhanced title (this would also explain why the DSi runs Pokémon Black at the same speed that a 3DS does). For Pokémon games, every gen 5 game is a DSi-enhanced title, but no gen 4 game is a DSi-enhanced title.

This is all the testing I've done so far. If anyone believes there are other factors that may cause the 3DS to run games slower besides loading transitions, feel free to share your ideas and I will be happy to test them out (or you can test them yourself if you have the appropriate hardware!).

Interesting. I never was able to test gen 4 since I don't own any gen 4 carts, and if I had at the time I would have found that 3DS was slower than emulator (since we know emu is always faster) and probably assumed it behaved the same way.

I did a [very] little bit of research and it seems like the best way to tell that a title is DSi-enhanced is by checking the title ID (TWL-yyyy-zzz or NTR-yyyy-zzz). TWL indicates DSi, NTR indicates DS. Here are some examples:

I include FF4 because this is one of the games I tested to confirm emulator speedup. I just did a very quick and dirty timing of the 20-door test in FF4 on my DS Phat, and it does seem to take approximately as long as the 3DS. This does lend some support to Garfield's theory.

Does anyone else have any DS games and multiple DS models they can test? It's very simple to do this kind of comparison, and I'd be happy to help you come up with a test plan. I'm really interested in getting more data here, because as Garfield has shown, the main problem last time is that we did not get sufficient data for our conclusions regarding console models.

I have all the gen 4 games and I came here to reply to you. I have Pokemon Pearl and tried it on my new 3ds and my dsi. I have concluded that it is in fact the same. I do not know why it is so slow on the new 3ds, it must just be the game. However if you buy Pokemon Platinum, it is normal speed. If you can get it for a good price do it. Otherwise, you will just have to suck it up and play with a slower speed.